What Is It with GOPers and Their Email?

by emptywheel

CREW and the National Security Archive won the first part of their fight with the White House--getting a court order requiring the White House to preserve their emails and the back-ups (h/t PJ Evans).

A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had argued strongly against.

U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the Executive Office of the President to safeguard the material in response to two lawsuits that seek to determine whether the White House has destroyed e-mails in violation of federal law.

The White House is seeking dismissal of the lawsuits brought by two private groups -- Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government and the National Security Archive.

This is just the first part of the battle, of course. The White House will surely invoke some kind of expansive privilege to avoid telling us taxpayers whether it destroyed emails, why, and how. But for now, they're forced to contend with an order that they keep the emails.

Wonder what will happen if we discover they've destroyed these, too?

Which is effectively what's been happening with Matt Blunt in MO. Via the Pope, Blunt has been definitively busted pretending not to know he shouldn't delete emails all the while he was deleting them.

A former staff attorney for Gov. Matt Blunt sent an internal office memo challenging his boss's stance on deleting e-mails just weeks before the attorney was fired, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The memo's existence and content contradict public statements made by Blunt and his top officials after the attorney was fired in late September. Blunt officials have repeatedly said Scott Eckersley never challenged - verbally or in writing - their policy of deleting office e-mail and brought up the issue only the day he was fired.

The memo also offers the strongest support yet for Eckersley's claim that he did advise Blunt's office about his e-mail retention policy, for which he says he was fired. Blunt has said the 30-year-old deputy legal counsel was fired because of shoddy performance and conducting personal business at work.

Gosh, you think there's a connection between all these GOPers and their disappearing emails?

Comments

[marksb]

Gosh, ya' think?
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I'll bet the WH will just say "no!" and dare someone to come after them, hoping to run out the clock. Maybe keep bumping it to a higher court, knowing that if they get to the top the chances fall their way. Maybe.

[Mad Dogs]

Repugs are in love with the "paperless society", except when somebody does backup onto tape.

[eyesonthestreet]

But, even if they do abide by this, I thought it was the RNC servers that were being used anyway by Rove, Myers, etc...

Wasn't that what was proven by the Justice Department Firings?

it all seems so long ago, my memory is fading on this.

[pdaly]

If the republicans do not succeed in monopolizing the telcom industry this electronic stuff will become a doubled-edged sword.

Soon enough, in their effort to enact their plans across the country they'll have to resort to human couriers on mule back to continue operational secrecy. .

[marksb]

IIRC some WH folks were using RNC servers and Blackberry accounts (which seems clear to me with the intent to do stuff that they didn't want to show up on WH mail servers, but hey, I'm just a dweeb), but I think that involves another action than this WH server issue.

[Stormwatcher]

Reporters from the Kansas City Star asked Blunt today about the Saturday AP story backing Eckersley's account and ( video here ) got shoved out of the way for doing so. Blunt was clearly shaken by the questioning as he avoided eye contact and then motioned his driver to leave in mid question. Off camera, a Blunt body gaurd apparently made sure the Governor could leave without answering the question by shoving aside the reporters and slamming the car door in their faces. Wait for the reporter's comments at the end.

[Pete Pierce]

Um Henry Kennedy wants what when? He has a much better chance morphing into John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He "ordered the White House." I bet they are really bummed about this "setback." CREW is five years late and 5 million destroyed emails and hard drives short. Those hard drives are long gone from this earth.

There's a simple thing about a court order and the White House. Fielding and Addington don't give a damn what the courts order. They are above, around,and beyond the law. Congress and the Courts are completely irrelevant to them. Try to match any court rulings with any compliance during Bush's administration and you will have a very very difficult time, particularly ones involving "terrorism" or "surveillance".

There were never "archiving problems" at the White House. They may be stupid, but they have plenty of access to IT help. MSFT spent 50 million in the beltway just to establish enough presence to service the gov 24X7. Their approach to those 5 million or so emails was to deliberately and effectively destroy all of them.

If it isn't clear by now, the White House has destroyed all significant evidence, and they aren't testifying before anyone, nor is Rove, nor is the twit candidate for the world's dumbest attorney Harriet the Rat Miers.

The objective of the White House is not to give a nano-millimeter on any issue, any information, and they are succeeding admirably. The compliant gutless Democrats go along with every last vote for the Bushies.

I um wouldn't hold one's breath to see the White House comply with any order from a trial court, or appellate court and Kennedy can't bring back the missing emails.

I wouldn't trust anyone in the White House to comply with any court's order to preserve anything. There is literally nothing to stop the West Wing from blowing off this order and no way or no one to enforce it.

Who? US Marshalls? A US Attorney? The US Attorney from D.C.? There are close to 5 million emails on a ship that sailed over four years ago, and those have been long destroyed--and I guarantee you although any HD would be recoverable those HDs were lost from planet earth years ago.

This is a White House that laces every law passed with signing statements. As for as they are concerned the Unitary executive answers to no one, and now they have their puppet in place who has never had respect for the Constitution Moooooookasey--a staunch subscriber to the Unitary Executive theory.

Within a couple weeks the White House will have complete control of the Telcoms and everyone's emails because your chickenlivered so-called Democrats on Judiciary are voting and marking up any way the White House wants.

I don't know 'bout living la vida loca, but living in the middle of the middle of 1984 ain't much fun.

[Jodi]

Pete Pierce,

what the White house did or didn't do, I don't know.

I do know that your statement "and I guarantee you although any HD would be recoverable" is incorrect.

[bmaz]

Pete - I dunno, Harriet the Rat's actual legal skills may be superior to those of Albertoad Gonzales.

[Pete Pierce]

"Jodi" I'm not surprised you're ignorant of programs like MIT's, but they have recovered any information off any hard drives including those in the ocean for years and "erased" by government protocols. But you have to have a hard drive in some kind of shape. That doesn't apply to the criminals in the White House.

If you think I meant hard drives that are destroyed or gone are recoverable, you're equally in error. MIT can take info off the edge of a hard drive. You need to read up, but from the posts I've seen you need to read up in an infinite number of directions.

Your statement with nothing to back it up is the same type statement Laura Ingraham gave on ABC this morning that Iraq is improving on all fronts. Including the 2.5 million refugees who can't find jobs, because the Arab brothers won't let them work in their countries.

These White House Hard Drives have long disappeared as have about 5 million emails--intentionally and that was my point. They don't answer to any laws anywhere.

And Jodi try something new in your life. When you say you know something--try documenting it or supporting it--something totally foreign to you.

[Pete Pierce]

I'm sure that's true bmaz but both of them had zero federal litigation experience before leaving Texas, --and what people forget as Jeff Toobin points out at all his talks--Harriet Miers is the only Supreme Court candidate who withdrew who was sure to be confirmed. Nothing would have stopped her confirmation no matter how many questions she couldn't answer. Refusing to answer questions because you're ignorant of the subject matter (as she was) or because you just don't want to because you're getting ready to Hijack the S.Ct. like Roberts and Alito still results in no answers--just like Mooooookasey.

And the only difference between the 109th Congress and the 110th Congress is that you knew the majority was voting with Bush up front--and it took a few months to realize that the new Majority is voting with Bush up front now on every significant issue and confirmation.

[bmaz]

Pete - I at least think that Miers had been in state trial courtrooms at some point and she did actually handle cases in a law firm. The only time I have ever been able to discern that Gonzales was EVER in an actual trial courtroom was when he made a brief appearance in a municipal court to get Bush out of DWI jury duty. My understanding is he walked through the courtroom and discussed things in the judges chambers for a few minutes and left. That would be the sum total of his courtroom experience as a lawyer as far as I can tell. (He did sit as an appellate judge for a little over a year with a quite unremarkable record).

[Pete Pierce]

Bmaz that's true. I'm sure she had some state experience. Miers was the first woman hired for Dallas’s Locke Purnell Rain Harrell. She was elected their President--what this means I don't know.

But she had no federal litigation experience, and that is just one compelling reason she didn't belongs on the S. Ct. It's bad enough that you have judges on the D.C. Circuit, the Eleventh Circuit and most other appellate circuits who have had no litigation experience in a federal courtroom.

And her twitesque conduct while in the White House is consistent with her lack of federal experience.

Brett Cavanaugh comes quickly to mind on the D.C. Circuit. Frank Hull aka the Paris Hilton of the Eleventh Circuit, had little litigation experience and no federal experience whatsoever before doing brief stints in state court and superior court and then hopping to the Eleventh Circuit. Almost all cases she saw were from the state court bench--not ones she had to argue, and she never set a toe in a federal courtroom before being given the Eleventh Circuit appointment. It was one of Clinton's worst appointments, the requirement being that Hull be an anatomical female.

That Bush nominated her for the Supreme Court is a great index of his particularly sociopathic brand of chutzpah. This is a guy who could care less how much he damaged this country and its people--or how many laws he breaks or ignores.

Interestingly, although I suspect Miers would have voted the same way as Thomas, Scalia, Alito, and Roberts always will in lock step, IMHO, her votes would have been somewhat less predictable than those of Roberts and Alito.

Dershowitz has said and written that Renquist did more damage on the Supreme Court than any other justice in history. I predict that Roberts and Alito are going to surpass Renquist's damage. They are considerably brighter, and hire smarter law clerks who are totally committed to the base, and they will be exponentially more Machiavellian in ruling against the individual and for affluent business, for a Unitary Executive, and for the executioner rather than the accused every chance they get. Roe's sacking is a matter of time, just like Telco immunity and considerably more secret government particularly since no Democrats will stand up to Republicans on any confirmation, vote on a bill, or other issue.

[bmaz]

I'll be honest, there is a pretty fair argument that Miers is preferable to Alito, even though she was nowhere near as qualified. She actually did some fairly decent pro-bono things and wrote a couple of things during her years at Locke Purnell that indicated she was not the heartless right wing ideologue that Alito is (her writing was abysmal in quality though). Miers is also older and would not be taking up a seat anywhere near as long as Alito. I still have a slim hope (growing weaker rapidly) that Roberts may moderate somewhat and at least be acceptable. This would depend on the court being shifted back left though, which won't take place, if it does at all, for quite some time. The next two likely openings will be Stevens and Ginsburg's chairs; putting good Democratically appointed progressive justices in those positions only maintains the status quo. It is the two after that that will be determinative.

[Pete Pierce]

Good points Bmaz. I wish I shared your optimism on Roberts, because I think he is just as venal as I know Alito is, but has a smoother and somewhat more scholarly and polished persona--more of a deadly velvet glove. Your read on Miers as not as heartless is probably dead on, but she had such unabashed adoration for Bushie for putting her into a D.C. spotlight that she couldn't wait to do his bidding. You need a lot of Phenergan to stomach those love notes from her to Georgie.

[Citizen92]

If this article isn't damning, I don't know what is.

Bush's team instituted e-mail deletion when he was Governor. And they brought the policy with them to Washington. And the policy was illegal in both places.

Bush or his top lieutenants knew. This was deliberate.

[Jodi]

Pete Pierce

you say: "they have recovered any information off any hard drives including those in the ocean for years and "erased" by government protocols"

Further you challenge me to back up what I said. Well, I challenge you to back up that absurd statement.

[Jodi]

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I am still laughing!
Here is a little joke: "Ok, I confess. I was responsible for getting rid of the hard drives. You can go to Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (about 7 miles down) and get the 5 times DOD top secrecy protocol erased disks. I am so sure you will fail to find anything useful on the disks, that I tell you this."

Hey and get back to me too, Pete. Don't be a stranger.

[hauksdottir]

Those emails don't exist only on the writers' computers. They don't exist only upon the recipients' computers. Even if both parties destroyed the emails, they left a trail of packets spanning the Internet, hopping in and out of caches, bouncing from node to node and leaping from server to server. Nets are tenacious because of the multiplicity of links. A line will fail completely if it breaks, but a net with a broken link will still catch fish.

If the FBI did its job properly when Aragoncillo (the Filippino spy) got caught operating out of Cheney's office, those original hard drives will be preserved in labeled baggies. I imagine that Ralston's computer files would be fascinating to browse through. Given the slave workers on our Iraqi embassy, one remembers the PPI affair... but I'm digressing.

Destroying a ring of information is almost as hard as destroying The One Ring. Maybe harder. One could drop a hard drive into an active volcano, where even MIT might fail to recover the data, but how could one melt down all the links and nodes of the entire Internet?

[phred]

EW, just wanted to point out that I clicked both PJ's link and yours this morning and ended up at an article entitled "Witness describes holding Diana's hand". Just thought you might want to fix the link (if possible).

[phred]

hauksdottir -- you raise a point that has puzzled me for awhile now... How are backups performed on the backbone of the internet? For example, an end user's computer might be set up to do a full backup once a week with incremental backups each night. As email is flitting around the web, is it preserved for some period of time on each machine it passes through? If so, how long is it preserved? And further, given the distributed nature of the web, how hard would it be to piece together a 7 year record of emails (assuming they were not preserved on the originating/receiving WH machines) from however many intervening machines were involved over that period of time. It strikes me as a daunting task of reconstruction. OTOH, given the telecom spynet, everything is probably readily available right now.

[P J Evans]

phred - newspapers are like that. Try today's LA Times story.

[bmaz]

What? Bush and Cheney were involved in the Diana crash too? Those guys are pure evil!

[Jodi]

hauksdottir,

you are right in a small degree but effectively and usefully totally wrong. It is like a garden hose. The water keeps going through. Granted if the shutoff is applied the water still in the hose will be stopped and stay there, but once the shutoff is opened again, the next water washes out the old, though it could be argued that there are a few molecules stuck on the walls of the hose for a while even with the water flowing. These however are useless for a reconstruction of the original water.

It is also the case that people pick up little tibits of data and information here and there over time, and then when they wish to they reconstruct this data is a way that is favorable to their highest hopes, their dreams and wishes.

But it isn't true just because you want it to be.

The greatest recent example of this kind of wishful thinking is the Vendetta against Karl Rove. Yes he was a sneaky little "bas*rd" but he really isn't Darth Vader and really, really didn't kill Diana.

Honest! Honest In'jun!

[Jodi]

hauksdottir,

you are right in a small degree but effectively and usefully totally wrong. It is like a garden hose. The water keeps going through. Granted if the shutoff is applied the water still in the hose will be stopped and stay there, but once the shutoff is opened again, the next water washes out the old, though it could be argued that there are a few molecules stuck on the walls of the hose for a while even with the water flowing. These however are useless for a reconstruction of the original water.

It is also the case that people pick up little tibits of data and information here and there over time, and then when they wish to they reconstruct this data is a way that is favorable to their highest hopes, their dreams and wishes.

But it isn't true just because you want it to be.

The greatest recent example of this kind of wishful thinking is the Vendetta against Karl Rove. Yes he was a sneaky little "bas*rd" but he really isn't Darth Vader and really, really didn't kill Diana.

Honest! Honest In'jun!